If you’re a regular reader of The Playlist, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name Antonios Papantoniou by now. Sound familiar at all? Papantoniou is a fastidious and astute independent filmmaker who also makes incredibly detail-oriented, painstaking studies of camera and shot techniques employed by some of the greatest directors working today. He’s dubbed these video essays his “Shot by Shot” series. We’ve already featured ones he’s done on Spielberg (“Jaws”) and Scorsese (“Cape Fear”).
Before Papantoniou studied either of those films, though, he turned his focus to the incredible and classic union station scene in Brian De Palma’s 1987 hit, “The Untouchables.” Ok — brief time out. If for whatever reason you haven’t yet seen the scene in reference, it’s one of the most tense, beautifully choreographed, flat-out awesome shootouts ever to be committed to film. We've added it below, so
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Sometimes, high school can be a virtual hell. Mileage varies by the individual, of course, but in a place where acceptance at a lunch table can be akin to finding an oasis in a desert, there's more weight on the shoulders of many teens than just their backpack straps. Such is the case for Ewen High School student Carrie White, the telekinetic titular character of Stephen King's seminal debut novel published in 1974.

Carrie has been adapted for the screen multiple times for multiple generations, and Scream Factory is giving the Generation Y versions a high-definition upgrade, with their Carrie and The Rage: Carrie 2 double feature Blu-ray now set to hit shelves with an official release date and bonus features, including two new audio commentaries.

Don’t we all love us some telekinetic teenage angst? The gang over at Scream Factory certainly do, and are set unleash a double dose of Carrie White onto Bluray, when the double feature of 2002’s Angela Bettis-led Carrie adaption and Kat Shea’s 1999 Carrie sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2 hits shelves on April 14th. While last year saw yet another adaption of Stephen King’s classic novel, the 2002 version was a lot closer to the source material and though nothing will top Brian De Palma’s 1976 Carrie, the Bettis-led version is quite entertaining. Plus, with scenes like seeing one of the kids from Home Improvement getting his balls impaled in The Rage: Carrie 2, what’s not to like about that one?

From early Bond to 21st century sci-fi, here's Ryan's pick of 11 unforgettable villain pairings from action cinema history...

You're generally lucky if a movie has one genuinely great villain in it, let alone two. This is probably because creating a villain takes great acting and writing - it's one thing to create a preening character who stomps around a story doing unpleasant things, but creating a villain who's three-dimensional, witty, scary and above all memorable requires considerable skill.

Every so often, a movie comes along which gives us not one, but two classic villains, with the personality of one complementing the other. A familiar dynamic was once laid out by Steven Spielberg: one is smart and eloquent , while the other is the tougher, more violent of the pair. It's a template that we've seen time and again in cinema, but it's only occasionally that both characters leap from the screen.
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Cut! is a satire of the indie horror "industry" and a clever, dark parody of indie horror films that both embraces and sends up the clichés that we have come to expect from straight to DVD horror. It is also a very good movie that ingeniously disguises itself as a very bad one.

Travis is a manager at a studio warehouse with an encyclopedic knowledge of horror, who dreams of making a horror movie, but despite the wealth of resources around him, can't seem to come up with the resources to make his dreams come true. His friend and coworker Lane is an unstable ex-con with a penchant for pushing people's buttons.

One of the hardest bouts of growing pains experienced by adolescents is that rite of passage known as the high school experience. In high school one is subject to discovering their own sense of self-identity and purpose. In fact, sometimes the social factor is crucial because the cost of belonging in social-related circles is vital in a four-year commitment to belonging among your peers.

The tension is high to belong and get along as your search for excellence in good grades, social interaction and the overall learning experience is important. However, not every youngster can cope with what they are faced as the obstacles to excel are demanding in high school. Hence, the potential to become “an outsider” is inevitable and the unlikeliest label that no one can overcome no matter how much they try.

The movies have been instrumental in capturing such heavy-handed angst and frustration of the tortured
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Criterion brings British auteur Nicolas Roeg’s most famous title to the fold, 1973’s enigmatic Don’t Look Now, a title that has influenced generations of filmmakers since its successful reception, and marks the director’s fifth title to be included in the illustrious collection. A refracted dreamscape of symbols and motifs, the film is a brooding jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t insist on answering all your questions, and happens to feature an unforgettable finale that’s lost none of its affect (despite providing iconic fodder for famed parodies, ranging from memorable bits in “Spaced” to “Absolutely Fabulous”).

After the drowning of their preadolescent daughter, Christine, in the backyard of their estate, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) take off for Venice, where John accepts a job to restore some mosaics in one of the city’s many dilapidated churches. However, once there, the couple is introduced
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In a recent interview, Moroder's revealed that he's working on a new Tron game - one as yet unannounced by Disney. The music, he says, could also have the involvement of singer-songwriter-producer Skrillex.

"I'm going to meet Skrillex next week when I'm back," Moroder told Clash Music. "I'm doing music for a game for Disney's Tron. We have about five themes, electronic stuff and let's see if he's interested in remixing or re-working one of the songs."

Think that winning an Academy Award provides an actor with a surefire path to unlimited great roles? Think again. Oscars history is filled with stars who've taken home a gold statue only to see all their hard work undone in seconds with a stinker of a follow-up movie.

Exclusive Q&A: It arrived too late to factor in guild and critics awards, but the Clint Eastwood-directed American Sniper has established such a connection with American movie audiences that its dark horse chances of upsetting the Oscar status quo cannot be ignored. It passed Saving Private Ryan to become the highest domestic grossing war movie ever; it even shot past the U.S. gross of Bradley Cooper’s previous biggest hit, The Hangover, and trails only The Passion Of The Christ for biggest-ever R-rated domestic grosser. This, for a hard R film about the wartime exploits and horrors faced by the most dangerous sniper in U.S. military history, and the price paid by Chris Kyle, wife Taya, and his fellow soldiers tasked with door to door searches in Sadr City when it was the most dangerous place in Iraq.

Nominated for Best Actor for his spare portrayal of the Navy Seal sharpshooter,
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If Alex Ross Perry’s previous film, “Listen Up Philip,” aspired to the kaleidoscopic narrative density of a John Fowles or William Gaddis, his new “Queen of Earth” carries the spiky intensity and tart aftertaste of a John Cheever short story, as it observes the psychological breakdown of a young woman coping (badly) with a series of abrupt life changes. An unnerving, acidly funny work that fosters an acute air of dread without ever fully announcing itself as a horror movie, Perry’s fourth feature may unfold on a smaller canvas than the expansive “Philip,” but is every bit as sure of what it wants to do and how to get there, built around an utterly fearless central performance by Elisabeth Moss. Audiences who found Perry’s earlier work misanthropic won’t want to touch “Queen” with a 10-foot pole, but heartier souls — and connoisseurs of uncompromising auteur cinema — should rise to the occasion.
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What a pleasure to be at another film festival with you. Despite the frenzy of activity, the audiences and the society of such events, I tend to find them lonely places, so much time in the dark with your own thoughts, so many single-minded scrambles from venue to venue, most conversations before the late hours being mere passing salutations or monosyllabic recommendations. The only other time I’ve been able to strike up a correspondence like this is with the inimitable Fernando F. Croce during Toronto’s film festival, and I count myself lucky to be able to resume this missive format with you. It’ll be good to have a place to chat, both out there, in Berlin, and here.

This year, for the first in many, I have optimistically ﻿opted to visit the Berlin International Film Festival rather than attend the International Film Festival Rotterdam, mainly
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If you were to unleash a naughty, baroque prankster like Brian De Palma onto the grimly joyless adulterous goings-on of “The Loft,” you might wind up with the kind of delicious trash this thriller so wants to be. Filmed in blue-steel noir-in-color and featuring performances in which everyone’s either mumbling or screaming, however, this silly chamber piece about sex and murder elicits only yawns, interrupted by the occasional unintentional giggle.

A remake of a 2008 Belgian film, this movie does occasionally have that awkward feel of something that’s been translated from one language into Esperanto and then finally into English.
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Sean Penn: Honorary César goes Hollywood – again (photo: Sean Penn in '21 Grams') Sean Penn, 54, will receive the 2015 Honorary César (César d'Honneur), the French Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Crafts has announced. That means the French Academy's powers-that-be are once again trying to make the Prix César ceremony relevant to the American media. Their tactic is to hand out the career award to a widely known and relatively young – i.e., media friendly – Hollywood celebrity. (Scroll down for more such examples.) In the words of the French Academy, Honorary César 2015 recipient Sean Penn is a "living legend" and "a stand-alone icon in American cinema." It has also hailed the two-time Best Actor Oscar winner as a "mythical actor, a politically active personality and an exceptional director." Penn will be honored at the César Awards ceremony on Feb. 20, 2015. Sean Penn movies Sean Penn movies range from the teen comedy
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Rear Window Screens at The Hi-Pointe Theater in St. Louis Saturday morning January 31st at 10:30am

As with so many of Alfred’s Hitchcock’s films, Rear Window (1954) is a wonderful example of how to take an almost absurdly simple idea and spin out the maximum tension, character, humor and drama from it. It should be boring (a movie set in one room with a guy who can’t move) and ludicrous (a killer who murders his wife and chops her up in front of his neighbors) but it’s quite the opposite – riveting and eerily plausible. If ever there was a film about voyeurism and its relationship to cinema, this is it; Hitchcock tells engrossing little silent movies of the tenants (the newlyweds, the sculptress, Miss Torso, the dog-owners, the killer, the songwriter, Miss Lonelyhearts
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This little vampire makes you believe she can bite, wrestle and choke a man twice her size to death. It’s like a trip back to...

For those veteran theatergoers who saw Paris but didn’t visit the Grand Guignol before it closed shop in 1962, the new stage adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and screenplay “Let the Right One In” is a must-see. Stage director John Tiffany offers some superb reincarnations of the bloodsucking and bloodletting that distinguishes Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 vampire film, and he adds another grizzly touch, inspired by Brian De Palma, that will shock no
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Everyone knows Woody Allen. At least, everyone thinks they know Woody Allen. His plumage is easily identifiable: horn-rimmed glasses, baggy suit, wispy hair, kvetching demeanor, ironic sense of humor, acute fear of death. As is his habitat: New York City, though recently he has flown as far afield as London, Barcelona, and Paris. His likes are well known: Bergman, Dostoevsky, New Orleans jazz. So too his dislikes: spiders, cars, nature, Wagner records, the entire city of Los Angeles. Whether or not these traits represent the true Allen, who’s to say? It is impossible to tell, with Allen, where cinema ends and life begins, an obfuscation he readily encourages. In the late nineteen-seventies, disillusioned with the comedic success he’d found making such films as Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977), he turned for darker territory with Stardust Memories (1980), a film in which, none too surprisingly, he plays a
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Because we were obviously in desperate need of a new "Blob" movie, cinematic auteur Simon West ("Con Air," "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider") has signed on to helm yet another remake of the 1958 drive-in classic, which was previously remade in 1988 by director Chuck Russell. Kevin Dillon starring vehicles were all the rage back then, obvs.
Did we ask for this? I don't know, I think I'm good honestly. But since it's happening and there's pretty much nothing we can do about it, take a trip back with me as I revisit a few more horror films Hollywood just couldn't keep their hands off of - and judge which of the versions is the best.
"King Kong"
The 1933 classic was first remade in 1976 with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges, who starred opposite the robotic ape from the Universal Studios tram ride. Nearly 30 years later Peter Jackson decided to remake it as an epic three-hour film,
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He’s also had a hand in other notable Hollywood hits (and flops) including Carlito’s Way, The Shadow, Snake Eyes, Zathura, Panic Room, Death Becomes Her, and many, many more. He’s had a fascinating career.

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